


Five Times No One Asked Erik Lehnsherr Whether He Wanted This, And One Time They Almost Managed It.

by apiphile



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Gen, M/M, a monster by any other name, charles you thunderous arse, horrible scenes of medicalised torture, i don't know anything about mossad, i don't know anything about russia still despite several fics, more bloody chess metaphors, reading about mengele was the part that made me puke, some of this could be read as dub-con it's up to you really, telepaths are tricksy bitches, thank you ruthi for fact-prodding, wikipedia is adequate research material right
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-29
Updated: 2011-06-29
Packaged: 2017-10-20 20:11:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/216671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apiphile/pseuds/apiphile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Does what it says on the tin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Times No One Asked Erik Lehnsherr Whether He Wanted This, And One Time They Almost Managed It.

**1\. trains**.

The carriage is silent, or as near as silence can come to a hundred men, women and children standing shoulder-to-shoulder like cattle in transport; beneath Erik’s feet there is a steady rumble generated from the regular click of iron wheels on iron tracks. It is as repetitive and perfectly even as a metronome, but fails to calm anyone. Even the babies are grizzling, unnerved by the tension.

There is a smell of fear in the air, of acrid sweat. No one seems to know where the train is going, and Erik, who is used to viewing his mother and father as the fonts of all knowledge far eclipsing the lurid and threatening _Rheinische Landeszeitung_ , is disquieted by their ignorance as much as by the uniforms and shoving.

“It won’t be for long,” a man says to his wife, with a querulous confidence that fails to pierce the weight of unspoken questions inside this old cattle-train.

Erik’s mother and father offer him no such reassurance, though his mother squeezes his hand. They know they do not know for how long they are to be detained, only that they have committed no crime and have no recourse to protest. The lines of information they do know have been this clear, and his mother and father do not lie to him.

“It won’t be for long,” the man repeats, and it sounds now more like a question.

The train rattles over points, _clack clack clack_ , and for a short and guilty moment Erik remembers that he had, as a much younger boy, wanted very much to ride the trains to other cities. He’d imagined the splendour of first class – white tablecloths, clean windows, and women in furs (though his mother told him women do not wear their furs while dining) – most of all he had imagined that he would alight the train at Zurich, a city of wonders in his imagination. He had imagined he would step down onto the platform willingly, and because he _wanted to_.

The carriage is silent, but for a mewling baby and the slow shiver of despair that passes through them like wind through barley.

 **2\. tables**.

White, cream, or beige ceramic tiles are easy to clean and solid construction for the walls of a specialist room. A floor which will not be spoiled by the regular infusions of fluids it receives is also necessary. A heavy table which can be neither burned nor bent becomes the centre of the universe for more than a year; Schmidt says it has been taken from the T4 unit with the same paternal grin and sparkle in his eye that he says “are you sure you won’t have some chocolate?” or “today we’re going to see how you fare against the elements” or “I’m not going to take the fire away, Erik, you have to undo your own restraints”.

The table is longer than Erik’s body, and wider than two of him. It has grooves in the solid white china both for the straps (with, of course, steel buckles) which hold him in place, and for drainage. Drainage, for both the times when Schmidt feels moved to test the incitement of Erik’s abilities by cutting into his body without anesthesia or even warning (“if you cared you would bend this scalpel right back like a length of string and stab me right in the eye, Erik, so I suppose you just don’t mind”), and for the times when the pain is too much for his body to keep all its functions in motion at once, and he pisses himself.

By the end of the first week under Schmidt’s care Erik is so well-acquainted with this room that he is able to recreate it in his sleep, whether he wishes to or not.

“You will learn control,” Schmidt says with his same pleasant, friendly, gut-churning smile, as he opens Erik’s arm to the tendons as though unzipping a bag; the stitches are fresh, the flesh unhealed. Erik sweats and drools into the same strap that has pressed his tongue back into his throat on every occasion, but he does not scream. Screaming does not change anything.

Schmidt presses a wooden splint against the exposed nerve of Erik’s forearm, because last time he pressed on the exposed nerve, Erik inadvertently detonated a steel bucket as if it was some kind of bomb, blinding Schmidt’s assistant. To Erik’s silent disappointment, Schmidt appeared to escape the shower of shrapnel entirely unharmed.

“I suppose you really must enjoy this,” Schmidt says, his words a shadow in the blazing light of agony, “I know you can stop me, Erik. There are is so much metal in this room, I have almost put your defense in your hands. I don’t know how to make it any easier, so I guess you just don’t want me to stop.”

And Erik knows. He knows because he has a map in his head of every single item within these ceramic-tiled walls which contains even a speck of weak and oxidized iron. He knows because the map of this room is seared into his mind as the electrocution plates have been seared into the back of his tongue. He knows the buckles he has bent and ruined only to find them replaced, he knows the buckets of rusted nails. He knows the copper pipes that carry hot water through the ceiling above, and he knows that Schmidt’s words mean nothing. They only mean, _I want you to be angry. I want you to succeed._

He would love to give Schmidt no such satisfaction, but his anger is stronger than reason, stronger than rational thought, and one day it will be stronger than the things that hold him down, and he will put through Schmidt’s brain every nail and penny and bullet and iron filling and golden ring for a thousand miles.

Schmidt jabs at the nerve again, and calls him a disappointment; Erik bends the frames of his glasses into the sides of his head.

They don’t even leave a mark on his skin.

 **3\. tel aviv**.

They have other priorities, they tell him. Eichmann. Mengele. Other priorities. Men who have done greater evil to more people. To more of his people.

And he’s not ready, they tell him. He needs to learn more. He needs to stop disappearing for months at a time chasing his own information. They have to be able to rely on him, they tell him.

Erik sits in the midday sun, coiling old wire into tight spirals, a strand at a time, over and over.

We have to be able to rely on you. We have to know you will come back.

 _Come when I’m called_ , Erik mentally supplies, but he says nothing in that cool room with the new map on the wall, just swallows his fury and comes out here, and coils wire. One at a time. Spiral after spiral.

There are bigger things at stake, they tell him. Schmidt is a small concern, a man whose actions, though undoubtedly vile – though undoubtedly collaborative with the regime that exterminated _his people_ like animals, that stole from them their lives and dignity and possessions – though Schmidt is, make no mistake, Lehnsherr, an _monster_ , we must pursue the worst first.

Schmidt was not that high ranking.

Schmidt was not that important.

Schmidt does not come so close to the top of the list.

Erik understands, though he doesn’t want to. He coils wire into tight loops under the sun and he understands: terrible monsters have done terrible things to so many people. But he also understands that only one of these terrible monsters was Herr Schmidt, and that only one of these terrible monsters killed his mother.

We have to be sure that you can be relied upon to pursue what is best for Israel, Lehnsherr, and not your own agenda.

And all the while a monster walks the earth with the blood of Frau Lehnsherr on his hands, smiling his insufferably paternal smile, and no one is chasing him at all, no good men, no one.

Erik coils wire in the midday sun and thinks monstrous things.

 **4\. taiga**

There are more rumours of the locations of the men and women he seeks than there are snowflakes in the breeze – which, by the time he reaches his supposed destination, 200 kilometres west of Zhigansk, are so dense that he might as well be walking through clouds. Erik has pulled his hat down and his collar up and wrapped the scarf across all but a narrow gash where his eyes and unfortunately the bridge of his very, very cold nose are.

It isn’t helping.

“Are you sure?” he asks Revmira, for what is nearing the hundredth time. She must be extremely tired of being asked, but he cares very little; this moment has been years in coming, furious years of hunting for threads as if for footprints in a fire.

“I am as sure as I was the last time you asked me and the time before that,” Revmira says, walking ahead of him toward the blank-windowed hut. It nestles low in the thick canopy of trees, but the cover is not dense enough to keep the roof from a deep coating of white. It looks as if no one could possibly live there, but Erik has learned that life will continue in places that no one thought possible.

He measures his steps behind hers, the page to Good King Wenceslas, and watches his breath form clouds in front of his face with every puff. Perhaps he should thank Schmidt for every moment spent immersed in freezing water, for the pins and needles and the moments where his life began to slip free of his body, before he kills him – without those hours, hours on hours of knife-sharp cold in his chest and his head, he would not have come this far.

“There’s no smoke,” Erik says, and he can no longer tell if he is anxious or filled with a kind of madness of anticipation. There is no sound from the snow beneath his feet, and he cannot feel his fingers or the impatient flutter of his heart. This is poor discipline.

“It would be a poor hiding place if your man advertised his presence to every passing soul,” Revmira assured him. “And this is where he hides. If he is not in _now_ he will be here later. We can lie in wait.”

“There isn’t any firewood,” Erik says, taking one step after another, his heart in his throat. He has a five Reichsmark coin in his breast pocket under five layers of fabric, but he thinks he can stand to tear his clothing a little in the name of destroying the vile life that thumps in the accursed body of the man who murdered his mother.

“It’s at the back, away from the prevailing wind,” Revmira says. The tone of her voice says plainly that he is being an idiot in his impatience, and some other Erik might have been ashamed, but the Erik Lehnsherr he has become pays little attention to her censure. The dark hut with its snow-white roof and half-covered doorstep of pine needles exerts a powerful gravitational pull, and Erik falls along on his feet as if drawn there by a hand, pushed there by history.

“Right,” Erik mutters, hardly hearing her. The door is five metres away. Four. Three.

There pine needles on the step are as thick and undisturbed as the forest he has trudged through for the last four days. Erik takes a steadying breath through his scarf, and rests his forehead on the lichen-spotted door, which is frozen shut. Even through the wool the air stabs at his lungs as if he is drinking pins.

When he has made sure that he will not roar the question and attract wolves with his voice, Erik asks, “Why?”

“He kept his gold here,” Revmira says. He barely looks back at her to see the gun in her hand, as natural an addition to her dark silhouette as leaves to a tree; Erik almost wants to laugh. Why should anything come easily?

“Why me?” Erik asks, and his voice comes out even more quietly than he expected. The cold in his limbs is nothing on the icy sensation that is creeping through his heart and lungs at the knowledge that he has been led so far away on this wild goose chase, so far away from his quarry. Schmidt has escaped and he is standing in a forest on the wrong side of the world.

When he looks, she is at least not smiling. “You had the resources to get us here. No one else had any desire to come into the dark woods without reason, but you – you, so vengeful and determined, so easy to mislead –” Revmira’s motion is immediately recognisable as the cocking of a hammer even against the snow glare. “And no one will miss you when you die.”

Erik concedes that she is right about this.

“It didn’t occur to you to share it?” he asks, delicately. There is no answer she can give which will change things, of course. He cannot let her walk away with a single bar of this blood money, dragging away the pain and suffering of _his_ people behind her on some sledge to pay for her happily ever after.

“Why do you think I found a vengeful idiot and not a greedy lover?” Revmira says, and she fires the gun.

Erik extends his hand palm-out, and allows the feeling of betrayal to fountain through him like the blast of some underwater volcano; the bullet remains where it is, inside the barrel of the gun, and the force of the shot instead explodes the magazine, spraying her face with hot metal.

“You _wasted my time_ ,” Erik shouts, and the gun wraps itself around her injured fist as she falls, bleeding and shrieking, into the snow. “He could be _anywhere_ now. You _wasted months of time_.”

It would be expedient to either leave her as she is and leave this place, to hunt down Schmidt again as fast as he can; to get moving again before night, to put kilometres between him and the smell of human blood, for when the wolves come. But anger chokes him like a fist inside his throat, turns him on his heel to the dark blot of the hut, and drags his hand out to grasp at the air.

“You just wanted _gold_ ,” Erik gasps through the exertion, “you can have gold.”

The stock is not very many, when it comes smashing through the walls of the hut in a shower of rotten wood and dead lichen – only a dozen, at most, yellow bricks float through the air. They catch the low light and sparkle briefly before the snow blots out the sky once more; it is not very many, but it is enough for a greedy woman and it will be enough for other foul cowards the world over, stamped with the eagle and swastika.

“You can have gold,” Erik repeats, drawing his hand back. He swings his arm as if hitting a ball out of the air (and some not-yet-dead memory glitters in the deep oubliette at the back of his mind, the summer sunset and an idle and unremarkable attempt at a game of cricket with a boy he knew only by his nickname: Turk). The bricks of gold fly at Revmira, pummelling her already-ruined face so hard that one of them breaks through her skull, and out the other side.

It falls into the snow like a dead bird, bloody and inert, and around it the other bricks drop and slide and sink. Their weight becomes obvious as soon as they touch the ground, all their unnatural flight robbed from them.

“You can have _gold_ ,” Erik says at last, his breath condensing in the air in front of him.

He walks almost all the way back to Zhigansk with the gold bricks bobbing along behind him like goslings behind a goose.

 **5\. titanium**.

“You’ll need to be debriefed,” one of them tells him. “And you may as well get dry while you’re here.”

There is no may as well. He _may as well_ turn the ship around and chase after the submarine with every engine running and then _ram it_ onto a deserted beach and _pull Schmidt’s heart out of his body_.

In the darkness no one can see his face, but the little man who pulled him out of the water and nearly drowned him and _let Schmidt get away_ recoils from him momentarily all the same and repeats his mantra, “Calm your mind.”

“You let him leave,” Erik says, because it is almost the only thing he can think to say. His voice sounds hollow.

“You would have died,” the British-sounding man says, looking at Erik very intently through the darkness. A few lights on the ship filter down to where they stand, leaving them in murk rather than total blackness, and in this gloom Erik can see that his alleged rescuer has unusually large eyes. “Look, I don’t want to start losing people like us just as I _find_ them.”

“People … like us.” Erik decides that he really does not enjoy being looked at like this, with something between awe, fascination, myopia, and what may conceivably be lust or possibly greed. It is disquieting and unusual, falling well outside of the normal remit of emotions he instils: fear, disgust, anger, outrage, trepidation, and very brief greed. “I thought I was alone.”

“You’re not alone,” his supposed rescuer says, breathless and – as the deck lights blaze on again with an uncomfortably bright selection of bulbs – smiling damply at him with the kind of enthusiasm Erik has simply never encountered on the face of someone he wasn’t offering money to. “You’re not alone.” He seizes Erik’s hand and shakes it warmly. “Charles Xavier.”

“Erik Lehnsherr,” Erik says, grimacing back at him. Schmidt has eluded him. There are forces protecting his quarry which he had known _nothing_ about. And he is freezing and wet and the short man with the huge eyes is staring at him again.

“You’ll have to come with us,” Charles says, waving his free hand and still shaking manically with the other until Erik feels as if his brains are about to be rattled out of his head. “There are bigger things at stake –”

Erik glances back at the empty water dancing under the re-lit spotlights of the naval vessel. What choice does he have? He can hardly swim after the submarine.

 **1\. mansions**.

 _Do you mind if I_ — with an accompanying illustrative gesture is purely a formality, Erik understands. If Charles wants into his head, he has as much chance of stopping him as he did of keeping Schmidt's ceramic scalpel out of his chest, or the splint off his nerves.

Charles rarely finishes his questions. Half-way through he defaults to projections, gestures, or hopeful looks, petering out as if the initial exertion was too much for him. But at least he starts by asking.

He does also frequently wander into someone’s thoughts like a ghost through a room, picking through their memories or foremost fears with the graceless efficiency of an unwanted houseguest raiding the larder; clearly no one has ever explained that a man's mind is his sanctuary. Or this rule, like so many others, doesn't apply to a doctorate-holding man of means who can read thoughts as easily as Erik can strip, clean, and reassemble fourteen types of rifle. It just doesn't apply to Charles.

Someone has however been very firm on the matter of not _fucking_ someone before they've agreed to it, for which Erik feels he ought to be grateful but instead is merely vaguely surprised and then unimpressed. After all, Charles is firm that he has to agree to something before it can happen, but he is equally sure that Erik _will_ agree – there is no need to be able to read minds to see that.

“Would you be entirely averse to –” Charles asks, smiling across the chessboard with a mixture of sheepishness and coy interest, before turning his attention back to the pieces with such ostentation that it’s obvious he isn’t really looking at the chessmen at all.

“To?” Erik prompts. He as a strong inkling of the question; the image has crept up on him in conversation before, often so subtly that he was convinced that it was the product of his own mind, but Charles has been dancing around using the words for some time now.

Charles does not finish his sentence this time either, only looks up from the chessboard again and smiles an awkward and hopeful smile that doesn’t hide the way his cheeks have coloured. Erik rests the urge to physically throw the nearest knight at his head and settles for raising his eyebrows with a studiedly blank look.

“… If I have to spell it out, Erik …”

 _I wish you would,_ Erik thinks more peevishly than he is used to, but he simply shakes his head and frowns at the board, no more concentrating on the game than Charles was. There is too much tension for strategies, too much of the _wrong kind_ of tension. Perhaps if they only wanted to kill each other he would find it easier to think; a more familiar situation, one for which Erik has all the rules, knows all the moves, and would undoubtedly have the upper hand in.

 _I don’t think I should spell it out_ , Charles voice says, guardedly, inside Erik’s head like the echo of a thought imposed across everything else he is thinking. _I think it is important to be careful._

“In your own –” Erik asks aloud, with a grim smile as he takes in the extremely well-appointed room in which they sit, “— very secluded and very _large_ home?” He raises his eyebrows again. “In which you encourage us all to embrace our differences?”

“Well it’s a rather …” Charles starts to laugh. “A rather different difference.”

It is nervous laughter, well-disguised as humour at his own terrible wordplay, but Erik is not an idiot. _That_ is nervous laughter, _those_ are not his thoughts making troubling and graphic circuits of his consciousness, and the biting of his lower lip that Charles is currently engaged in is deliberate.

“Hardly.” Erik tries to chase the images out of his head. “Stop doing that.”

“I’m not doing anything,” Charles frowns. “Er, well. I may be chewing some dents into my lip but –” He gestures vaguely toward his temples, “— nothing here.”

Erik does not bother to dignify this with a response. He merely knocks over Charles’s queen with the tip of his finger and smiles what he hopes is a pleasant and not entirely aggressive smile, although his teeth escape halfway through and he cannot be certain he isn’t sizing up his chess partner like someone he intends to fight.

“But,” Charles persists, not sparing a moment’s glance for his felled queen, “ _would_ you --?”

“Get on with it,” Erik sighs.

It is a very awkward and unwieldy kiss. Perhaps it would be better if there was not a mostly-full chessboard and table between the two of them, or if Erik had been able to work out how he felt about it at all, and if Charles had some idea of what to do with his hands, and it would certainly have been improved by Charles not slipping on the table and by this misadventure banging his chin on Erik’s nose…

This did, however, serve to break a little of the tension.

 _Can I. Do you mind if I._ It is easier to say _no_ when it isn't a question he's being asked but an order he's being given, but Charles is polite.

He asks, sort of.

**Author's Note:**

> “Turk” was a relative of mine who died in Dachau. He was remembered primarily for being a keen cricketer, and the only photo anyone has of him is one of him playing cricket.


End file.
